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That was a really good clap.
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Good job, Amy.
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Dès que j'ai deux ou trois ans, ma mere m'a parlée en français.
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Dann im universitet, ich habe fur drei Jahren Deutsche gelernt… aber Ich benutze es nicht…
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In researching bilingual brains, that is, how brains work when someone speaks more than
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one language fluently, scientists have found there are differences.
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Bilingual brains activate in different ways depending on the language they're speaking,
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and and also demonstrate incredible cognitively flexibility, switching back and forth between
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languages in a phenomenon called code-switching.
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And a new study has found an interesting link between language and time: the language you
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think in can impact the way you perceive time.
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Every language has its specific vocabulary for organizing the world around us, but when
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it comes to time, there are two general categories this is done: distance, as in crossing an
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area, and volume as in a space being filled.
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Swedish and English both use physical distances to express a measure of time.
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In English we'd say “a short break” or “a long wedding.”
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We use these descriptive terms as though the passage of time is a measurable distance.
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In Greek and Spanish on the other hand, time is marked with terms that refer to volume.
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In Spanish you'd say "a small break" or "a big wedding."
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So the question the researchers had was whether people who think about time with distance
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or volume measurements have a better sense of how much time has passed.
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To measure this, they had Swedish-Spanish bilinguals watch a line grow across a screen
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or watch a container being filled, the first a measure of time as distance and the second
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a measure of time as volume.
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And in each instance the subject was given a prompt in one of the two languages — 'duración'
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in Spanish or 'tid' in Swedish.
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The results showed that subjects perceived time as it's measured in the language of
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their prompt.
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When given the Spanish prompt, participants estimated time based on volume, in this case
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how full the containers were.
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When they were given the Swedish prompt they could better estimate time as distance, using
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the line's travel as a marker.
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So this might not matter to any of us on a day to day basis, but it's interesting to
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have some scientific evidence pointing to how much language impacts the way we perceive
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something universal, the passage of time.
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And we even found this in our office!
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Maybe it's because I've been exposed to multiple languages.
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When I think of a big wedding I think of a lot of people and a long night.
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But other people in our office only think about the number of attendees.
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Language, it seems, can creep in and affect our most basic senses, from emotions to perception
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and, apparently, time.
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Which means it's possible that learning a new language could change the way you experience
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the world… which in itself is wild to think about.
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So this is our human brain, but would the same thing happen to artificial intelligence?
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We talk about giving computers consciousness in this episode right here.
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So who out there speaks multiple languages and is aware of these different cues for understanding
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time?
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Let us know in the comments, be sure to like this video, and subscribe so you never miss
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an episode of Seeker.
